Kung Fu Panda Demo Reel

Breakdown

• 00:00:00 - Peach petals. I was responsible for the second half of the sequence, where the petals detach from the tree, get swept up in the wind, swirl around Oogway, and gently dissipate him into cosmic energy. These shots required a combination of hand animation, spline-driven force fields, and numerous custom scripts to control petal behavior. Because of the high need for art directability, most of the motion was scripted in MEL rather than simulated.
• 00:00:54 - Secondary debris and dust. As outlined in the Siggraph 2008 paper on the subject, I used another artist's simulation of the collapsing bridge and stalactites to compute and generate entirely procedural secondary debris and dust to give the effect proper scale. The secondary debris was emitted both when two pieces of the bridge began separating, and also upon collision between two unrelated chunks. (Coincidentally, these were the first production shots of my career.)
• 00:01:08 - Rock destruction. Fracture was done using an in-house Voronoi adaptation, and the stone chunks were hand-animated.
• 00:01:10 - Door destruction. Similar techniques as above.